“Tell me,” he said.
“Is that on the packing slip, over the numeral one, for one pair of tights, is this check mark, in blunt pencil.”
“That’s right, there is.”
“And she looks closely at that check mark, and she imagines a male hand making it, a surprisingly refined hand, because there has been a strike at the Deliques warehouse, and what’s happened is that Deliques management has had to hire the male models from the catalog on an emergency basis to fill in for the normal pickers and packers, who are of course mostly middle-aged Laotian women. And they were right in the middle of a catalog shoot, all these male models, when the walkout took place, so they’re wearing exactly what they were wearing on the shoot, which are the usual aubergine paisley boxer shorts, and Henri Rousseau bathrobes, and Erté pajamas, and that sort of thing, but there was no time for them to change, they had to be herded barefoot into this giant warehouse because the company was bombed with orders. April was their biggest month. So—one male model takes this woman’s order slip, and studies it, looks at her name on it—what’s her name?”
“Jill.”
“Looks at her name, Jill Smith, and then takes the order slip and crumples it against the piece of horseradish in his foulard silk boxer shorts, and he hands it to the next male model, a gorgeous peasant with strange slitty nipples, who smooths it out, studies it, duh, Jill Smith, squeezes his asscheeks together, and passes it to the next guy, who smooths it out, studies it, bites one corner, and hands it to the next guy, and so on down this row of male models, each one broader-shouldered and sinewier-stomached than the last, until finally the order slip gets to the last guy, who’s fallen asleep sitting on one tang of the forklift, a much slighter gentleman, with a beautiful throat with a softly pulsing jugular you just wanted to eat it looked so good, and of course wearing a green moiré silk codpiece, pushed forward and upward by the one tang of the forklift. This male model rouses himself, smacks his lips sleepily, studies the slip of paper, gets in the forklift, and drives off, weaves off, toward the distant vault where they keep the pointelle tights.”
“Yes?”
“And he reaches the mountain of crates marked FAUN, and he slides the forklift into the highest pallet and lifts it off and, vvvvvvvv, brings it down, and he pries it open …”
“Probably with his dick.”
“No, no, with his powerful refined hands,” she said.
“The packing tape goes pap! pap! pap! as he tears the mighty box asunder. But now that you mention it, as he’s reaching in, deep into the box filled with … with one metric ton of cotton pointelle, his cock is pressing against the cardboard, pressing, pressing, and it starts to fight against the tethers of that codpiece. So he climbs back in the forklift, puts the pair of tights in his lap, and drives back. Well, while he was gone, Todd, Rod, Sod, and Wadd, the other male models, all heterosexual, of course, who’ve been standing in a row waiting for him, have been thinking about Jill Smith wearing those tights and by now their bobolinks have all gotten thoroughly hard, and even the sleepy forklift driver, perhaps because of the faun tights in his lap, is embarrassed to get out because there’s this frank erection that has now gotten so big and bone-hard that it’s angling right out of his codpiece. He takes his place in the row of male models, his cock swaying slightly, and he holds the tights to his face and exhales through them, then nods, takes a pencil with a surprisingly sharp point, and makes a check mark over the numeral one on the packing slip. He hands it to the next guy—by this time all the male models have abandoned their shame in each other’s presence and they are all standing there in a row with their various organs pronging at various angles out of their various robes and boxers and sex-briefs. So the forklift guy hands it to the next guy, who almost ritualistically takes the tights and winds them around and around his cock, pulls once hard, and then unwinds them and makes a check mark exactly superimposed over the first check mark on the numeral one on the packing slip. And he hands the tights to the next guy, who also winds the tights around his cock, many winds, it’s very long, and he pulls, and he makes a superimposing check mark, too, and so on down the row, wind unwind check, wind unwind check, and the final guy folds the tights up with neat agile movements that belie his enormous forearms and slides them into the sheer plastic envelope and puts the last check mark over the numeral one, so that it now looks as if only one blunt pencil check-marked over it, when really there were nine check marks. And so together, humming ‘The Volga Boatman’ in unison, they seal the package up with Jill Smith’s address on it and send it off to her.”
“Well, maybe that is what happened,” he said. “No, in reality, there wasn’t any strike at Deliques when I called. Their computer was down, though.”
“Oh, so you really did call?” she said. “That’s very wicked of you. In the bath?”
“No, in the end that seemed like too much trouble. I called from the living-room floor. First I worked myself up to a creditable state of engorgement, then I dialed the 800 number.”
“All right …”
“A woman answered and said something like ‘Hello and welcome to Deliques Intimates, this is Clititia speaking, how may we help you today?’ She had a young high voice, exactly the sort of voice I’d imagined. Well, my fourteen-and-a-half-inch sperm-dowel instantly shrank to less than three inches. Which is the opposite of what was supposed to happen. I told her what I wanted to order, and she said the computer was down, but she would take the order ‘by hand,’ right? Why wasn’t I enough of a leerer to come back with something insinuating? Just something basic, like ‘Heh heh, honey, I hope you do take it all by hand.’ But instead I just said, ‘Boy oh boy, that must be a lot of trouble for you.’ I gave her my address, my card number, and she said, ‘I’ve got that, sir, now, is there anything else you would like to order this evening?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m torn, there is one other thing I’d like to get this person, just a pair of very simple panties, but I’m torn.’ I said, ‘Now you see the so-called Deliques minimes on page thirty-eight? You see those? Do you have the catalog there right in front of you?’ She said she did. I said, ‘Okay. I’m not sure I can tell the difference between these minimes and the so-called nadja pants on page, ah, forty-six. To the naked eye they seem identical.’ She said, ‘Just one moment,’ and I heard her flipping through the catalog, and I made a last valiant attempt to stroke myself off, because the idea of her looking carefully at those pictures of women in those tiny weightless panties, with the darkness of pubic hair visible right there through the material, at the very same time I was looking at those same cuppable curves of pubic hair on my end, should have been enough to make me shoot instantly, but I don’t know, she sounded so well-meaning, and I knew that there was a very good chance that she would not like to know that I was there trying to … I mean, she didn’t want to work at a job where men called her and ordered a few items of merchandise just so they could … right? That wasn’t what she’d had in mind at all in taking the job, or possibly wasn’t, at least, so even when she said, finally, ‘Well, the nadja pants ride a little lower on the hip,’ which is a statement that any normal jacker-offer should be able to come to easily, because what does it imply? It implies her own hip, it implies that the nadja panties have ridden her own hip. But even then I could not achieve and maintain. So I said, ‘Oh well, no, thanks, I’ll see how the tights go over and then order the minimes later.’ And a week afterward, I was the owner of a pair of tights. I still have them, unopened. Give me your address and I’ll be glad to forward them to you.”
“Why don’t you give them to Jill?” she asked.
“Oh, a million reasons. But that’s not quite the end. I hung up from making the order and instantly I got hard again, naturally, and I thought for a second, and I hit the redial button, and a different woman answered, with a much lower and smarter voice, with some name like Vulva, and I said, ‘Vulva, I have what may sound like an unorthodox question, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. But
what I’m curious about is, well, of the men who order from your catalog, do you think some of them are in a subtle or maybe not-so-subtle way obscene phone callers?’ She laughed and she said, ‘That’s a good question.’ And then there was a long pause, a very long pause. I said, ‘Hello?’ And right there I knew I’d blown it—I knew the tone of my hello, that slight reediness in my voice that betrayed sexual tension, blew away the potential rapport I might have had with Vulva. See, I’d sounded quite confident when I actually asked her the question.”
“What did she say?”
“She just said, in a more official voice, but still a friendly voice, ‘I don’t think I’m going to answer your question.’ And I said, ‘Fine, I understand, okay, sure.’ And she said ‘Bye.’ Not ‘Good-bye,’ you notice—still the slight vestige of amused intimacy there. If she’d said ‘Good-bye’ I would have felt absolutely crushed.”
“What did you do then?”
“I sat up and ordered a pizza and read the paper. So you see, I’m not an obscene phone caller, really. I can’t smother an orgasm.”
“Ho ho. I can,” she said.
“Can you? Well, I mean I can physically do it.”
“I know what you mean.”
There was a pause.
“I hear ice cubes,” he said.
“Diet Coke.”
“Ah. Tell me more things. Tell me about the room you’re in. Tell me the chain of events that led up to your calling this number.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m not in the bedroom anymore. I’m sitting on the couch in my living room slash dining room. My feet are on the coffee table, which would have been impossible yesterday, because the coffee table was piled so high with mail and work stuff, but now it is possible, and the whole room, the whole apartment, is really and truly in order. I took a sick day today, without being sick, which is something I haven’t done up to now at this job. I called the receptionist and told her I had a fever. The moment of lying to her was awful, but gosh what freedom when I hung up the phone! And I didn’t leave the apartment all day. I just organized my immediate surroundings, I picked up things, I vacuumed, and I laid out all the silver that I’ve inherited—three different very incomplete patterns—laid it out on the dining-room table and looked at it and I gave some serious thought to polishing it, but I didn’t go so far as to polish it, but it looked beautiful all laid out, a big arch of forks, a little arch of knives, five big serving spoons, some tiny salt spoons, and a little grouping of novelty items, like oyster forks. No teaspoons at all. One of the dinner forks from my great aunt’s set fell into the dishwasher once when I was visiting her and it got badly notched by that twirly splasher in the bottom, and someone at work was telling me he knew a jeweler who fixed hurt silverware, so I’m planning to have that fixed, it’s all ready to go. And I even got together all my broken sets of beads—I sorted them all out—the sight of all those beads jumbled together on my bedside table was making me unhappy every morning, and now they’re ready to be restrung, the pink ones in one envelope, and the green ones in one envelope, and the parti-colored Venetian ones in one envelope—and I have them on my dining-room table too, ready to go.”
“The same jeweler who fixes silverware restrings beads?” he asked.
“Yes!”
“How did your beads get broken?”
“They seem to break in the morning when I’m rushing to get dressed. They catch on something. The jade ones, my favorite set, which my father gave me, caught on the open door of the microwave when I was standing up too quickly after picking a piece of paper up oft the floor. That was the latest tragedy. And of course my sister’s babe yanked one set off my neck. But they can all be repaired and they will all be repaired.”
“Good going.”
“Anyway, this apartment is transformed, I mean it, not just superficially but with new hidden pockets of order in it, and I waited until the midafternoon to have a shower, and I did not masturbate, because the illicitness of calling in sick without justification made me want to be pure and virtuous all day long, and I had an early dinner of Carr’s Table Water crackers with cream cheese and sliced pieces of sweet red kosher peppers on them, just delicious, and I did not turn on the TV but instead I turned on the stereo, which I haven’t used much lately. It’s a very fancy stereo.”
“Yes?”
“I think I spent something like fourteen hundred dollars on it,” she said. “I bought it from someone who was buying an even fancier system. It was true insanity. I had a crush on this person. He liked the Thompson Twins and the S.O.S. Band and, gee, what were the other groups he liked so much? The Gap Band was one. Midnight Star. And Cameo. This was a while ago. He was not a particularly intelligent man, in fact in a way he was a very dimwitted narrow-minded man, but he was so infectiously convinced that what he liked everyone would like if they were exposed to it. And good-looking. For about four months, while I was in his thrall, I really listened to that stuff. I gave my life up to it. My own taste in music stopped evolving in grade school with the Beatles, the early early Beatles—in fact I used to dislike any song that didn’t end—you know, end with a chord, but simply faded out.”
“But then you met this guy,” he said.
“Exactly!” she said. “All of the songs he liked faded out, or most of them did. And so I became a connoisseur of fade-outs. I bought cassettes. I used to turn them up very loud—with the headphones on—and listen very closely, trying to catch that precise moment when the person in the recording studio had begun to turn the volume dial down, or whatever it was he did. Sometimes I’d turn the volume dial up at just the speed I thought he—I mean the ghostly hand of the record producer—was turning it down, so that the sound stayed on an even plane. I’d get in this sort of trance, like you on the rug, where I thought if I kept turning it up—and this is a very powerful amplifier, mind you—the song would not stop, it would just continue indefinitely. And so what I had thought of before as just a kind of artistic sloppiness, this attempt to imply that oh yeah, we’re a bunch of endlessly creative folks who jam all night, and the bad old record producer finally has to turn down the volume on us just so we don’t fill the whole album with one monster song, became for me instead this kind of, this kind of summation of hopefulness. I first felt it in a song called ‘Ain’t Nobody,’ which was a song that this man I had the crush on was particularly keen on. ‘Ain’t nobody, loves me better.’ You know that one?”
“You sing well!” he said.
“I do not. But that’s the song, and as you get toward the end of it, a change takes place in the way you hear it, which is that the knowledge that the song is going to end starts to be more important than the specific ups and downs of the melody, and even though the singer is singing just as loud as ever, in fact she’s really pouring it on now, she’s fighting to be heard, it’s as if you are hearing the inevitable waning of popularity of that hit, its slippage down the charts, and the twilight of the career of the singer, despite all of the beautiful subtle things she’s able to do with a plain old dumb old bunch of notes, and even as she goes for one last high note, full of daring and hope and passionateness and everything worthwhile, she’s lost, she’s sinking down.”
“Oh! Don’t cry!” he said. “I’m not equipped … I mean my comforting skills don’t have that kind of range.”
There was another sound of ice cubes. She said, “It’s just that I really liked him. Vain bum. We went dancing one night, and I made the mistake of suggesting to him as we were on the dance floor that maybe he should take his pen out of his shirt pocket and put it in his back pocket. And that was it, he never called me again.”
“That little scum-twirler! Tell me his address, I’ll fade him out, I’ll rip his arms off.”
“No. I got over it. Anyway, that wasn’t what I meant to talk about. I just mean I was here in my wonderfully orderly apartment after dinner and I saw this big joke of a stereo system and I switched it on, and the sky got darker and all the little red and green lights
on the receiver were like ocean buoys or something, and I started to feel what you’d expect, sad, happy, resigned, horny, some combination of all of them, and I felt suddenly that I’d been virtuous for long enough and probably should definitely masturbate, and I thought wait, let’s not just have a perfunctory masturbation session, Abby, let’s do something just a little bit special tonight, to round out a special day, right? So I brought out a copy of Forum that I rather bravely bought one day a while ago. But I’d read all the stories and all the letters and it just wasn’t working. So I started looking at the ads, really almost for the first time. And there was this headline: ANYTIME AT ALL.”